The Cabinet of Curiosities

Cloud Computing Company Services

stephanismith — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:55:00 +0000

The following are some interesting Cloud Computing companies:

Zmanda - Cloud Backup. Backup files to the cloud or backup objects in the cloud. Uses Open Source such as Amanda (File systems as S3 Objects to Sun Storage) and WebDAV (for MySQL databases) to have a web UI to schedule/manage backups to/from the clouds.
RightScale - a web-based management/monitoring tool for multiple cloud vendors to provision servers including common server apps and easily deploy and scale up and down applications.
GoodData - BI offered for your business hosted in the Cloud.

Sun Open Cloud Platform

stephanismith — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 23:49:10 +0000

The following notes about Sun’s Cloud offerings are taken from CommunityOne East Web Event.

Sun Cloud – First cloud offered by Sun is “Sun’s Public Cloud”. This cloud for tinkering, for the Open Community, etc. The cloud is available as Project Kenai.

At the lowest level (IaaS) Sun is offering

Compute Service – Virtual Machines, Networking, Storage
Storage Service – Storage Objects, WebDAV and S3. Based on Open Storage (ZFS). Open Office can save directly to this already under “Save to Cloud”.

To access and provision in their cloud, Sun is offering two methods:

Virtual Data Center – a GUI Driven provisioning system to provision Compute Services and Storage Services. Drag and Drop GUI networking, servers, etc.
Open API (Sun Cloud API) – Public RESTful API under Creative Commons license, open to all, to programmatically provision. Starts with a single URL and all functionality discoverable under that. Code libraries in Java, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Eucalyptus – Open Source Cloud Computing

stephanismith — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 22:25:33 +0000

Eucalyptus is an open source distribution to deploy your own Cloud Computing environment on whatever servers you might have lying around your basement… Or if you are an enterprise, you can deploy your own internal cloud computing environment.

Eucalyptus was developed at UC Santa Barbara as part of their high performance computing work.

Eucalyptus currently supports the Amazon AWS APIs and Sun is working with them to add the Sun APIs. Eucalyptus is/will be available in Ubuntu Jaunty/Jackalope release.

Enomaly sells service and extensions for enterprise customers for cloud computing and uses Eucalyptus as it’s base.

Twitter as a Job Search tool

stephanismith — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:40:47 +0000

The following article in BusinessWeek, “Is Twitter the Next Monster? “, is an interesting discussion (especially the comments) about how to mine Twitter for potential jobs. For example, even just using the standard search capabilities of twitter – i.e. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jobs+boston – is something to consider. There are already people building avenues to mine this for jobs easier, such as:

Companies are also setting up there own Twitter accounts, such as AT&T – @attjobs.

Other Job Sites – large and small

stephanismith — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:50:23 +0000

The following are other Job Sites that I peruse:

Ones that may have more (early-stage?) startups:

WebInnovators.com
STARTUPly
Mashable/Jobs (lots of links to sites, including startups)
VentureLoop (VC’s companies job listings)

3 Major Job Sites to Post Resume

stephanismith — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:25:06 +0000

In some other post I’ll detail other large-ish job sites, but I wanted to highlight the following three because Bullhorn – a major SaaS service for recruiting and staffing – integrates the three following job sites directly _into_ the workflow of their application. Bullhorn services 14,000+ recruiters at over 1,400 firms worldwide so that is a large number of recruiters. The three integrated search sites are:

Bullhorn, Inc.

stephanismith — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:25:00 +0000

Bullhorn, Inc., is a SaaS service for staffing and recruiting. I ran into references to this company from several sources that make it a very interesting company to look at:

a segment on boston.tv about a www.mitx.org event where Bullhorn was announced as a winner of MITX Technology Award – 2007 Collaboration & Social Networking,
2006 Boston Business Journal Best Places to Work,
Deloitte 2008 Technology Fast 500 List, and
I asked a recruiter I was talking to about their product – and he went on for several minutes about how fantastic ‘his bullhorn’ is.

Bullhorn’s site has a lot of information about the product and the company. There are several corporate level bloggers and the key note speeches from their last user conference – Bullhorn Live 2009 – were very informative. (Note the number of third party companies producing add-ons or offering customization services for Bullhorn – always a good sign of a healthy SaaS service.)

Bullhorn was initially started and sucessfully grown for ~8 years without VC funding – an excellent accomplishment in and of itself. Bullhorn recently aquired VC funding to take its product ‘to the next level’ so this company should be actively expanding and looking for talent for the near future at least.

Are you using LinkedIn to its fullest for searching for jobs?

stephanismith — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:55:38 +0000

Yes, we all know that we should be using the power of Networking to improve our chances of finding that next career move. And yes, we all know we should be using LinkedIn… but are you using it to your full advantage?

These are some ideas that I have been doing that I am not sure if others were – so why not put them in my blog, :

LinkedIn has a Jobs - you will probably see jobs that have been posted elsewhere, BUT in LinkedIn you may see more info like who the recruiter actually is! In addition, you may be close enough, connection-wise to request a ‘Referral’ through your connections.
For any job posting anywhere – look up the company in LinkedIn and find a networking path to get to someone in the company to get your resume to the right people.
Look up the companies of connections that you have, then look at their websites for Career openings. I have heard from several recruiters that more and more companies are going it alone and not using recruiters and just posting jobs on their sites. This is the same idea (and one source for ) making that ‘target company list’, too.

These following items are probably things you are already doing (and if not, then further things to add to the ‘to-do list’):

Expand your Connections Part 1 – don’t ever consider yourself ‘finished’ with this part. Keep racking your brain, thinking of old colleagues and/or contacts (vendors, clients, etc.) When other business during the day reminds you of a past connection, make a mental note to add them to LinkedIn.
Expand your Connections Part 2 – Peruse your 1st level connections’ connections looking for people you have not thought of.
Fill out your Profile from your resume.
Ask for recommendations

More Startup Info

stephanismith — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:37:40 +0000

Lessons Learned Blog by Eric Reis – Eric describes his experiences with ‘lean startups’, in particule IMVU.

Startuply.com – they also have a Blog – Post jobs from startups and search jobs at startups, especially early-stage startups.

crowdSPRING – place to post projects for creative content like logo’s, business cards, web site (uncoded). Starting at $200 USD, guaranteed at last 25 submissions. Although I have seen on average many more submissions.

CEP Blogs

stephanismith — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:36:33 +0000

Keep in mind, blogs are opinions and it behooves you to understand the writer’s biases. That being said there is always useful information after it has been properly ‘sifted’ – mine included, BTW, .

Complex Event Processing Blog

Tim Bass’ Blog

http://magmasystems.blogspot.com/

Oracle CEP Blog (by Seth White)

Aleri Blog

Tibco Blog

Apama Blog